Belief in the power of community is at the heart of Paul’s life and work.
As a global leader and award-winning author on issues of community engagement and change, Paul is the Co-founder of Tamarack Institute and for 20 years was the CEO/Co-CEO. He is the founder and was the director of Vibrant Communities a national network of nearly 500 cities and communities ending poverty, deepening community, building youth futures and advancing climate transitions. Prior to that Paul founded and served as the CEO of Community Opportunities Development Association (CODA). CODA was awarded the distinguished United Nations Best Practices (Top 40) award for their community economic development work in the Waterloo Region of Canada. Paul’s newest venture is founding BE Community Ltd., a consulting company whose mission is to support communities to discover and realize breakthrough community change.
Paul is the author of five books including two best sellers (Deepening Community and Community Conversations). His latest book Breakthrough Community Change is a practical guide to whole community change.
Paul holds an M.A. in Leadership and in 2020 was selected as the Arts Alumni Achievement Award recipient at the University of Waterloo, Canada’s top innovation university. He is a global faculty member of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD) and a senior fellow of Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social innovators. Paul was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2019.
Paul grew up as the son of refugees that worked together to survive and thrive. This experience is what made him deeply curious about and engaged in ideas that cause people to work together for the common good.
Visit www.paulborn.ca for more information about Paul and his work.
Transcript of the Interview:
Bill Locke
(Introduction) Once you begin to see a community as a place of opportunity and a place of gifts, rather than a place of problems, everything changes, your ability to work in that environment is completely different. Have you ever wondered how communities can be induced to work together to address their biggest issues such as poverty, homelessness, or racism? Paul Born is the go-to guy to help you figure it out. He has helped communities to bring about solutions in over 500 cities and towns across North America. He’s written five books about it, and he’s won the highest award for citizenship in Canada, the Order of Canada. Paul, welcome to Kolbe Times.
Paul Born
Well, I’m excited to be here with you.
Bill Locke
You know, Paul, I have to say, I have admired you and your work for a long time. Because in my day job, I do community development type of work and capacity building and community projects. But nothing like the scale of work that you have done, which has really been amazing. So I’m really excited to hear about how you got there, and some of your adventures along the way. But I cannot help but wonder how you started before you became the Paul Born that I know today. Where did you begin?
Paul Born
Well, thanks for that question. And thanks for all the great work that you do. Like, I grew up in Abbotsford, British Columbia. In a fairly cloistered group of Mennonites, maybe not the way that you might know them as in Hutterites, or Amish or old order Mennonites. We were modern Mennonites, but we were refugees from the Ukraine. My mom and dad came here in ’49. I was born in ’62. So they had been here a bit already, you know, maybe 12-13 years when I was born. But you know, we had gone through some really difficult times, both of my grandfather’s had been executed in the Ukraine, by the Soviets. And they had gone through famine and war, Stalin was very ruthless to the people there. And so there was a lot of healing that needed to happen. My sense, they needed it, probably 25 years after they came, they started to maybe trust a little more and get more involved in society. But I was part of a small congregation was that small, we were about 400, altogether, congregation, and all of us came from the same background. So I that was my life.
I spent maybe three evenings a week there, obviously, Sundays. But there was a lot of social activities and a lot of eating together. And then, you know, a lot of the people who went there were my were my cousins. And so those were my friends and, and, you know, we hung out together, we farmed, I went to a public school. But that was very formative for me. When when I was 16, I started my own first company. And it was a chicken catching company of all things. I had about 100 employees. And they were in shifts, and I would go and move chickens for big farmers, with with labor, because I was kind of a labor contractor. And that was a lot of fun. I was very formative. And then at 18, I went off to seminary, I kind of felt that I had done the business thing. There’s only really two things you could do in life growing up Mennonite in my world. One was to serve the church and the other was to make money serve the family in that sense. So I chose the latter. And I mean, the former the church and I went to a Bible school in a little town called Altona, Manitoba, and had a wonderful year one of the best years of my life was just a small school of 50 students, and then went off to it was at that time called Canadian Mennonite Bible College it was a seminary, preparing to become a pastor. And that was didn’t turn out too well as my as my Rector there, said, Paul, I think you like sin too much. This is not a good choice for you. So I don’t think that was really true. I just, I think I had too much of a living spirit spirit. I had too much of an independent mindset. And that required me to be maybe a pastor wasn’t that wasn’t the best thing for a pastor.
So I went back to my hometown of Abbotsford, British Columbia and started working for Community Services. And since I had a lot of business experience, they hired me to turn around their charitable businesses they had for charitable businesses. And there was a small team and we turned them around and made them all profitable again, and much more friendly to the low income people and the people with disabilities that were working in them tried to really professionalize those businesses. And then they moved me to a dying division that was trying to get people back to work and, and I thrived there. I just loved it. I did that for a while and then went back to school. I came out to Waterloo, just to finish a degree. That was the only school that recognized my seminary credits University of Waterloo, and had a wonderful year. Met Marlene, got married and ended up in, in, in Ontario in the Waterloo Region of Ontario, got my first job at the Unemployed Help Center, which became the Community Opportunities Development Association, just a small three person shop that was really insecure, really not doing well and, and I worked there for about a year and they asked if I’d become do the Executive Director work, I said, let’s see if we survive first.
And then I did become the Executive Director. And for some reason, we had a lot of luck. And within the next 10 years, we grew to a staff of 100 and had offices in four cities. That’s where then we started Opportunities 2000, which was the precursor to the Tamarack Institute, and, and, and Vibrant Communities Canada, which is the work I think you were referring to. So we had built up this large community economic development organization. And, and lots of good things were happening. I mean, we had a hit team, and there was free trade happening at the time. And a lot of the plants were leaving our community. And we had a team that would go in and, and help all those workers get new jobs, and we had over a 98% success rate of placing people into jobs. And just to give you a perspective, most of the groups that went in and did that work, barely hit 60%. So it was a really high ratio, we helped over 1100 people who were low income, struggling, unemployed, start small businesses, very large number of people. We had a Business Action Center, we had our own bank. We did all that work with them coaching, trading, venturing, buying clubs, the whole bit.
And of those 1100 82% (81.7% to be accurate) survived more than five years. Just to give you a set, the Canadian average is 50%. So it was a really interesting, highly successful organization. And we were awarded by the United Nations, one of the 40 best practices in the world. Now, I tell you this, because there’s a counterpoint to this. And this is the seminal moment in my work. We had been really looking at what was our overall effectiveness as an agency, we’re quite large by then. What was our cost benefit? Like were we actually benefiting society? And we brought in people from many places, including Harvard Business School, and the London School of Economics to help us there were people in you know, near us that that had the credentials. And when we went up to accept the award from the United Nations, I remember getting up and just thanking everyone, you know, and doing what you do as an executive director.
But then I said something that was really controversial. I said, you know, I find it really interesting that we’re being awarded today. Because in reality, after all this good work we’ve done, poverty has gone up in our community by 5%. So, my understanding if you are a corporate executive, and you lose 5%, of your community of your business, wealth, in our case, community wealth, you get fired, not recognized. So I’m not sure we should be accepting this award today. And I walked off the stage. So you can see how that didn’t go over so well. But after that I was a local community and started raising money. And I raised about one and a half million dollars in just a few months. And we launched Opportunities 2000 to become the lowest level of poverty in Canada. So we’re going to tackle the root cause of poverty, and really begin to look at say, we don’t want better poor, we don’t want poor to have better lives, we want less poor. And that’s what we’re going to focus on. And that’s what our community focused on. And we did it.
And a number of people came up to me afterwards foundations and so forth and said, Can we take this nationally? At first I said, No, but they convinced me. And now that program is in 400 cities, in Canada, the United States. Canada, as you know, has reduced poverty from 16.8%, when we started, and we’re down at 7.2%, post COVID. So during COVID, we’re at 6.5. But now, because of the third money, but now after COVID, it’s gone up just slightly, but 7.2. So poverty has dropped by almost 10%. That is big. That is really, really big. Millions of people are no longer poor in Canada, that were. And there’s all kinds of reasons for that we’ve worked very closely with the federal government. But anyway, we can talk more about that about how that happened, and what that strategy was, and what the work is. But that essentially has been my life’s work.
Bill Locke
So what I hear from you is that there was some kind of epiphany, in which you recognized that the work that you were doing, and others were doing, though good, was not having as widespread an impact, as you would hope. And maybe what you’re doing then is rising up from looking at things from the point of an executive director of a single organization. But looking at it from a standpoint of leadership, as a member of the entire community, and calling other people to rise up to that next level.
Paul Born
Well, it’s really interesting, because we do so much good work in Canada, and we have so many talented people working on it. And yet, we’re having real trouble moving the metrics. And we make all kinds of excuses for that. And honestly, I believe one of the most significant reasons we’re not having the impact we want is because we have the wrong measure. You know, if we want better mental health than we need to focus on resolving mental health issues with people, we need to be creating programs that help people overcome.
Bill Locke
And that’s another can of worms, defining charity and defining the intention behind the work that you’re doing. Why don’t you tell me about the Tamarack Institute.
Paul Born
Around 20 years ago, Alan Broadbent of the Avana Capital Corporation, and Tim Broadhead of the McConnell Family Foundation, they approached to have me expand the anti poverty work, and to Alan. But Alan really wanted a learning center, he said, I want you to focus on the ideas that you have created here and teach them. So we did created a learning center and we extended vibrant communities, the learning center today has 51,000 learners. So it’s very large, it’s those learners are active, most of them participate with us monthly. So that, you know, that’s almost the size of a university. Right? And, and we produce if you see our monthly newsletter, that gives our listing of courses that we teach, there’s, you know, maybe 20, every month that people can participate in a whole variety of, of levels. And then the Vibrant Communities I’ve already talked about, it’s the anti poverty work, but then that’s expanded. Now there is Youth Futures, there’s 22 cities gathered together working very deliberately to their middle sized cities, to keep their youth in their cities and to grow that.
There’s another one called Deepening Community or Building Belonging that is, is developing citizenship and active systems and strengthening community. And that’s in 57 cities and then in 40 cities with our newest division, which is community climate transitions, all using the same methodology that our poverty work did. So when we just started with one issue poverty, we’re now working on four issues. And there’s a staff of around 50 at Tamarack that works, mostly in Canada, but quite heavily in the United States and around the world. The idea was, you know, could we work differently? Could we think differently about the work and Alan was, in particular, Alan Broadbent, an amazing philanthropist, you know, who often follows charities like most business people follow the stock market. And he had a big belief in the role of government to change things.
But he came to understand, particularly through the Harper years, that government was less effective in community. And that citizens were, what’s the word for it, were rising up in a sense, they were they were more or less trusting of government, and citizen based solutions, were going to have a bigger impact. That was his sense. And that’s why he wanted us to invest in that and train on citizen level engagement. And that’s where we focused on the issues of community engagement, collective impact, collaborative leadership. Those were our, our big ones. And just really kind of thinking differently about the work that was going to be in front of us. Asset Based Community Development is a huge part of our work as well. And of course, you know, Peter Block and John McKnight and others very active with our organization and helping us to grow and learn this way. That’s the Tamarack Institute. It’s been it’s been massively successful. And in attracting learners and the impact of our work, and, you know, I think in a sense that we were at the right place at the right time, we had the right backers at the right time. I don’t think we did anything overly unique. But yeah, it was just really exciting. And energizing. To see this take off. But it’s been like the almost non stop for 20 years. And yeah, that’s that’s the Tamarack Institute. And I’ve led both sides. Liz has run both sides. And now Tanya is there as well as CO CEO.
Bill Locke
Fantastic. You have also been writing, you’ve written a number of very successful and I would have to say powerful books, the latest being Breakthrough Community Change which just came out this year. I was very interested in one of the chapters, something that I think is very important about what is called Collective Impact. You’ve made reference to it just a few minutes ago. Tell me what that means, especially what it means to you and why it’s important.
Paul Born
Lovely. Can I can I start by talking about my writing? Of course, I just want to encourage people: if you desire to write, right, you don’t have to be good. You know, I almost flunked High School. So when my teachers hear that I’ve written five books, I think they just about fall off their seats. I was not a good student. But interestingly enough, you know, I’ve written a series of books, one’s called Leaderful Community, so that the other one was called Vibrant Communities where I documented the methodology for the poverty work we were doing, that I wrote Community Conversations. And you know, it was a simple book, about how communities organized in many ways it was a forerunner to the collective impact work. And what was interesting about that one, is it became a national bestseller, which I thought was really interesting, because it’s not that interesting of a book. Thought it was because it was that interesting, but it really caught a nerve for people. Then it was Deepening Community that also became a best seller and that that is now actually more popular than ever or after COVID. And it was really my plea that we invest in civil society. And in a sense that if people did not experience community, they would not express altruism. And we needed people to express altruism.
If we were going to have community, especially collective altruism. And that was the big, big push on that book. And then the latest book is Breakthrough Community Change. And in that book, I’m trying, it says, you know, developing common agendas that change everything, common agendas that change everything. And in that, I lay out the methodology that Tamarack has used for 20 years and has grown and matured. And for that I said, in addition to this methodology, there were six areas that are deeply important to us, in terms of you meeting to learn, if you are going to really be able to implement this methodology that we’ve created. And one of the most important was Asset Based Community Development. And the second most important, was Collective Impact. So let me start with asset based community development very, very quickly, and then I’ll move into the collective impact. So in asset based community development, there was a deep understanding that every person had gifts. So it’s not like you’re looking for, like, you know, the highest educated or, or the most powerful.
It’s that recognition that in a community, there are many gifts, that desire to be shared. And our job is to evoke that, right and to enable that. I love that so much, that once you begin to see a community as a place of opportunity, and a place of gifts, rather than a place of problems, everything changes, your ability to work in that environment is completely different. Collective impact says, When you bring the right citizens together, they can lead change. And so but what they need is first and foremost, a common agenda. So we spend a lot of time engaging with people, having them to get excited about ending poverty, having them get excited about deepening community. And once they get excited, and energized, and they want to do something, we begin to ask, What can we do together. And we write that down. And that’s the common agenda. A common agenda isn’t like a strategic plan. Because the difference is, is that you spend all this time ensuring that people are engaged, and that they want to act. Right? Collective impact, it’s about having an impact. It’s about making something change, right? The second one is the sister of a common agenda. It’s shared measurement. We say like, it’s, you gets so emotional about change that you want, we need to also be very cognizant of the data.
So what we say is, the collective needs to understand the data, not just a small group of the collective telling you what the data is, and we need to all agree, okay, if that if those numbers if those numbers change, right, if we have less people living below the poverty line, that is data that’s important to us. Right? If we have people improving their income, That’s data that’s important to us, who’ve improved their housing, who’ve had better access to day care, like so we need to understand the numbers that we’re trying to affect common agenda, shared measurement. Now, we have to implement this and that’s called Mutually Reinforcing Activities. So what happens is that everything we do now is interrelated. We go into a place like Calgary, there are hundreds, if not thousands of agencies that are doing amazing work. Okay. And all of that is making a difference.
So the question now is, how do we work together? And we say, it’s not just the human service organizations, it’s also always business has a big role to play. Government has a big role to play. And then people with lived and living experience, have a role to play an extremely important role to play. Right in poverty. These are people living in poverty, but they have lived and living experience of poverty. And they can direct us and help us in ways that are unusually effective. And so we try to create these mutually reinforcing activities, where all of those sectors, those four sectors are working together on similar issues. The fourth area in collective impact is continuous communication, which means we’ve got to keep everybody engaged for a long period of time. This isn’t like a three month thing. This usually takes place over five years.
And we are very deliberate about communicating and working with people and making people feel motivated. The momentum continues to grow and build. And eventually, under Barack Obama, the White House Council on Community Change adopted it as one of the two most important things that needed to be spread across the United States.
Bill Locke
I think what you’re talking about are really seminal ideas in what we used to call or I guess, still call Community Economic Development. It comes down to people joining forces, with a certain intention, be it reduce poverty, or, you know, skill up people who need to catch up so that they can work. And it’s, these are ideas that you’ve proven, and Tamarack and proven can work in a wide variety of communities large and small. But I would hazard a guess that, number one, a lot of people are still not aware of these ideas, especially these methodologies. And secondly, I think a lot of people have kind of given up, or at least been discouraged in this kind of work. Because you know, problems are not gone, we still have the same kinds of issues, maybe things are a little bit better. But then there are other issues that have come up, like you’ve mentioned, mental health, which seems to be increasingly a problem, especially for a certain age group. Would you agree that we have a lot of work you have to do?
Paul Born
Yes, I see. There’s lots that needs to be done. But we we need to keep thinking about how we’re going to solve things. Not just make them better. Right? I don’t want better people. I want people with less major problem. I want less major problems in the world, I want to reduce things, right? Why do we have this growing epidemic of people who are lonely, and experiencing mental health, we can give counseling, we can put them in training, we can give them medications, all of those things. But that’s not causing, there’s a root cause of this. People don’t just suddenly become ill. From nothing. Right? So we need to keep thinking like this. And that’s working, you know, the collective the work of the citizen, the role of people with lived and living experience. It’s just remarkable how, in the last 20 years, the number of places I go, where there’s not one former client or current client on the board. The staff only engage with the client as a client, the other. And there’s even bodies of thought who say it’s unhealthy to engage people with lives and living experience. “It’s so unprofessional.” But I mean, these are the people with the wisdom. How did we get that thing? Right?
And so there’s so much change that still needs to happen. And I just want to mention the role of faith because I know that many of your audience are interfaith. I truly believe that the church can be an amazing place of change. And if you think that your church doesn’t have the energy to get involved in things like this, just watch, get involved and the energy rises! We found people say “people are tired, they’re burnt out.” They don’t, you know, they’re there. Once we get them going, and once people are involved in meaningful things that are helping others, and particularly if they’re doing it together, which we call collective altruism, that energy comes back. What builds energy, even if you’re an introvert is purpose and collective purpose. And that is the hope, I think, for the church. And you don’t have a deep belief that the renewal of the church is in its belief in community, its belief in an active role in community, and in doing what God intended, that we would create a great place for all of God’s children to live. That’s why I’m grateful not only for the Tamarack Institute, there are many agencies out there who are thinking, the way that we are about this work.
Bill Locke
That’s a great place, I think, for us to stop and reflect Paul, on not just your work, but the work of citizens of civil society overall, which is really what Kolbe Times is about, causing people to think about themselves differently. So thank you so much. Thank you for not just sharing your ideas, but opening your heart to to us today.
Paul Born
Thanks, Bill. And if your readers want to reach out to me, I always respond. Best way to get ahold of me is at www.paulborn.ca. That’s a website that’s easy to find and you can get more. I appreciate your work. Looking forward to continuing to promote what you do in the world.
